Grandfathers's Journey

Now to catch up on that last book of the week that we did way back in March. This week's choice was Grandfather's Journey by Allen Say. Zoey and I both really enjoyed this book. It is a story about a Japanese man who comes to America in the early 1900's and falls in love with the country but misses his home country. Throughout his life he goes back and forth between the countries. The story is written with few words but tells an immense story.

We started as usual with the story disks. We put one in Japan and one in California. We talked about how the main character liked and disliked different things about each place he visited. Then we tried to talk about our likes and dislikes of different places but let's just say that was a short conversation. We reviewed different things about Japanese culture. We had learned about these when our book of the week was A Pair of Red Clogs. I always say I never know what will stick with Zoey. Well, one of the new Japanese culture things we looked at this week was fans with Japanese artwork. Since then Zoey notices them everywhere. Funny how that works.

For language arts we discussed poetic prose, imagery, and similis. I don't know if she understood much of it or not. For art we discussed the formal style of each of the pictures in the book almost as if they were photos. Then we discussed the reflections and shadows used in the artwork. We used a flashlight to see how things can be light on one side and dark on the other. I tried showing Zoey how to draw shadows and she just wasn't getting it. No big deal but she wanted to understand what I was trying to tell her. All of a sudden she says, "Oh, I get it now!" It was so funny. The next day we worked with watercolor pencils. These are awesome! Zoey and I both loved working with the.

There were so many art lessons with this book I didn't want to miss any so we also explored origami. I ended up doing all of the folding but it was cool. The next week when Zoey went to the Monday afternoon library class for school-aged children they made origami! Perfect timing.

For applied math we counted how many days in a week, weeks in a month, and months in a year. We also counted some things in the book. I have science scheduled on Friday and because of Gymnastics we keep missing it or catching it in the following weeks. We looked at books with beautiful pictures of American landscapes and also learned a bit more about birds.  Little did I know we were about to learn about birds up close and personal. To be continued with my summary of the Spring Download N Go. Hopefully coming soon.

Too busy to type...

We have been so busy lately with school and life in general I have been too busy to type anything here. My last update was about Katy and the Big Snow. After than we started a unit study about Winter from the company Download N Go.  Even though we tried multiple times to get through this we only made it through day three.

Day 1: What is Winter?
Day 2: Science Secrets of Winter
Day 3: People and Places of Winter
 

The nice thing about unit studies is they are for multiple ages. Whatever we missed this time we will get the next time we study it. I think because we did so much winter themed books Zoey was just done with the subject by the time we started this. We had fun with the days we did do. Sierra loves joining in on these too since there are interesting videos clips to watch. Most are only a few minutes, which are just the right length. 

 

Next we moved on to the book, Stopping by Woods on a Snow Evening by Robert Frost. This was more of a study in poetry and artwork than winter. We learned about Alliteration, the repetitive consonant sound in the lines of poetry. We worked on memorizing parts of the poem too. This week was very relaxed as every activity was only discussion based.

 

Ready for something new our next book of the week was Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel by Virginia Burton. I didn't think Zoey was going to like this book very much but I was very wrong. She loved hearing the story over and over again and dove into the activities each day with gusto. Zoey decided to put the story disk on North Carolina since we keep seeing large construction equipment here. They are widening the road near the library so we see road construction equipment all the time. We liked finding old things in the book and discusses Mike Mulligan's flexibility on day one. On day two we learned about how you can come up with a variety of characters for a story you are writing, learned vocabulary words, discussed what a literary classic is and discussed personification again. This time we personified our van by giving it a name, Graycilla the Wondervan.  For Art we drew simple trees like in the book and experimented with different ways to show motion in a drawing. On Thursday we got out the geoboards. We first made a square, four corners neat and square, just like the basement Mike Mulligan and his steam shovel, Maryann, dug. We made more shapes and designs after that just to see what we could come up with.  Our science experiment on Friday did not go so well. We made a simple pinwheel, attached it to a pencil eraser with a pin and held it over a pan of boiling water. The steam rising was supposed to make it spin. Nope! At least we tried. Zoey didn't seem to care and I didn't think she really even remembered it after a few minutes. However, last week when we were in Target she saw a pinwheel. She said, "Hey Mommy, remember that thing we made and it didn't work!" I could only laugh. Children really do remember everything. We also had discussions about creative thinking and road engineering so the day wasn't a total bust.  All week long we read books about large equipment and now a month later Zoey still doesn't want to take those books back to the library.  This week was a huge success!

 

The Glorious Flight: Across the Channel with Louis Bleriot July 25, 1909 by Alice Provensen took us off into our next adventure.  This book is based on Luis Bleriot's flight across the English Channel. It has added hummor and wonderful illustrations that made it a hit with Zoey and Sierra. The story disk went right over the english channel. We had to move Madeline and How to Make an Apple Pie and See the World's story disks a bit to fit it in which gave us a great chance to review what we learned about those books and France and England. Many things were discussed throughout the week, family relationships, making reparations, italics, ordinal numbers and so on. We also learned about Onomatopoeia (words that create the sound as you say them, for example, boom.) Zoey really liked saying this word and completely understood what it ment. One day when I couldn't remember how to pronounce it, she did!  By the middle of the week we were enjoying some beautiful weather so we took school outside which gave us the perfect place to do the art activity, perspective and viewpoint. We drew an apple upclose and far away, from the bottom and the top. We looked at examples in the book of different perspectives and Zoey got it! I loved it when I took the apple to the other end of the yard and she drew it so tiny. We did our reading and math outside too. It was a great day.

The last day of the week Mat and I flew to Dallas so we finished up things the following week. I am always amazed how simple things like making paper airplanes can thrill young children. The girls played with thier paper airplanes all week (the second week) and we read all of the go-allong books about airplanes and avation history that we got from the library. One day Zoey and Sierra were playing with the planes outside. Zoey set up her buckets in a row. She told me they were the White Cliffs of Dover.



A large bowl was the English Channel and she flattened out a grass spot and called that the city.

She then made multiple attempts to fly Blairot XI (what Zoey named her paper airplane) over the English Channel. Finally she had a success, just like in the book!

She did this all on her own. I thought it was awsome but maybe I am biased. You can see the white bowl she used as the English Channel in the foreground of this photo. LOL Things really can be simple for kids with imagination.

Aside from the book of the week we continued with phonics, math and other various stuff. Zoey is learning to read more and more every day and it is freaking me out just a little bit. Well I have one more book of the week to catch up on and now we are doing a unit study of Spring with the same company, Download n Go but reviews of those will have to wait as dinner must be started. Thanks for enjoying our journey with us! I can't believe you read the whole thing! Please note, I typed this very fast with multiple distractions and spell check is not working.

Funny

A few days ago Zoey had some ice in her drink. It was starting to melt and she was looking at it and told Mat and I she was doing an activity. She was waiting for the ice to melt and then she was drinking it. We both laughed (after she left the room.) I guess simple things really are the best huh?

Katy and the Big Snow

Way back over a month ago our book of the week was Katy and the Big Snow by Virginia Lee Burton. We still had snow around from the previous week so snow was fresh in our minds. The story is about a snow plow that saves a little town after a blizzard. I really liked the story but I was worried Zoey was not going to like it. It was one of the books I ordered at the beginning of the year and when she saw it she told me she didn't like it at all and put it back in the pile. Thankfully when I pulled this book out Monday morning she was so excited. I think the highlight of the week was the snow plow video I checked out from the library. Both Zoey and Sierra loved watching the snow plows and different snow moving machines on this short DVD. It was made for children and filmed in Canada where they have plenty of snow.

One of the first activities I had planned was to create the city Geopolis from the book with our blocks, cars, train track and people.  I thought this would be Zoey's favorite activity of the week. She didn't even want to do it. I was so surprised! I sat there trying to convince her and then realized how useless that was. We moved on to our discussion of the different responsibilities of different people in a town, like firefighters, police officers, doctors and more. We talked for quite a while about this and Zoey had so much to talk about. We also talked about the responsibilities of each of us around the house.  The next day we had vocabulary words from the book then we discussed how personification is used in the book. Our activity was to take wiggly eyes and put them on different things around the house to make them more human like. The girls loved this and laughed and laughed.

Here is Sierra personifying the front door. I thought the funniest one Zoey's. She personified the light switches in her room. There are three together. The end ones looked like eyes and the middle one looked like a nose. It made us all laugh.

For art we talked about all of the detail in the pictures of the book. So much is going on in each one. There is one picture where a house is on fire and the fire department is putting it out. Zoey had so many questions about that page. What happened to the people in the house? How did they get out? Why was the house on fire? And more and more questions. It just goes to show you never know what will spark a child's interest.

For applied math grouped manipulatives by fives until we had 55. Katy had a 55 horse power engine and we had already talked about what that was. Zoey likes counting by 5's so this was fun too.

We didn't have enough horses so we used all of our farm animals. Little things like this really seem to be helping her get a better grasp of numbers in her head. This makes me think of something that happened last week. I recently bought a book called Games for Math by Peggy Kaye. It has so many suggestions for simple math things to do with your kids. I needed to keep Zoey busy for a minute so I asked her to go count all the doors at her end of the house. She lit up and ran to go count. After a minute or two she came back and said, "19!" I said, "Wow, I didn't know there were that many doors down there." She told me she counted drawers too because they are kind of like doors to her. How could I disagree. The point was to get her to count and to keep her busy for a minute. Success! I look forward to using more of the ideas from this book.

For science we briefly discussed weather patterns. We made a weather chart in December so she did not want to make another one. No big deal. I am glad this week turned out so well after Zoey's initial reaction to the book back in August. Sierra was right there for most of it too. As she gets older she is joining in on so many more things.

Both this book and the book we used the week before this, The Snowy Day, brought up discussions about street signs. It went great and we did so many things inside but Zoey never wanted to talk about it when we were driving around. That was last month. Earlier this week we were reading one of the street signs books that we still had checked out from the library. On our next car trip Zoey had me read and explain every street sign on our drive. Some she already knew and read those to me. It is funny to me how, much later, things children have learned can all of a sudden pop up and make sense to them.

I am glad that I am blogging about all of this because it really makes me realise how much fun we are having and that we are all learning new things. Thanks for reading.

Reading

Zoey is starting to read some three-letter words! I really didn't expect her to get it (reading) until sometime next year but we kept plugging away at our phonics. She has been reading little words for a few weeks now but yesterday she read her first sentence all by herself! She was so excited. The sentence was, "Pet the cat." She wanted me to read it first, this is what we usually do, but I told her I knew she could do it. Once she did that I added another word to it, "Pet the wet cat." We both agreed we would not want to pet a wet cat, lol. She likes so write and asks me to spell words all the time but now when she asks me she already has the first letter or two sounded out herself. I must admit I am having a great time teaching her to read among other things. It is not easy and sometimes downright frustrating but to see her reading is so wonderful.

Meanwhile, Sierra is counting everything, finding "o's" everywhere  (her favorite letter) and just learned to cut with scissors. In no time at all she went from barely holding the scissors to cutting correctly.  She is wanting to cut so much and in such tiny pieces that I started giving her papers that need to be shredded. It saves me some time. I have even got her cutting over the trash can. She also talks all the time now. She is quite the chatterbox. It wasn't that long ago I was worried about her not talking.

I hope to have more week reviews soon. Thanks for reading.

The Snowy Day

Today while showing my parents some pictures of the girls I realized that I never did a review of our last two weeks. So here we go. Two weeks ago we did The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats. This book was taken from the Before Five in a Row that is for children ages 2 to 4 so I knew Sierra would be able to join. She loved every bit of it! Zoey did too. As if on cue, Monday morning we woke up to a snow covered world. We went out into our snow covered world and played and sledded and had fun until we were too cold to do anymore then we came home and had hot chocolate for the kids, tea for the grown ups.

We didn't end up starting the book of the week until Tuesday, but it sure did help to have all of Monday's memories with us as we started this adventure. Since this was a Before Five in a Row title the activities are much simpler and shorter. We discussed how Peter realizes that he is not old enough to play with the big boys in the snowball fight and how he handles that. Every time we read the book after that Sierra would say, "Not old enough" when we got to the page of the snowball fight. We discussed sharing memories. I told Zoey about the time it snowed in Florida when I was a girl. I remembered all I wanted was to see snow then one day my mom woke me up and had me look out the window. It was snowing! It was also very early in the morning. I remember being excited to see the snow but not being to happy about being woken up. Sounds like me now. I told her how my sisters and I scraped up all the snow we could from the car to make a very small snowman. I asked her if she could remember any snow story she wanted to tell me. She said, "No." Sometimes I get so much out of her and then other times, nothing. Oh well on to the next day.

Zoey reading the book to Sierra.

Zoey and Sierra loved art day. We had tissue paper cut into shapes, water color paints, and colored glue. They were the quietest they have ever been while working on their pictures. Sierra was very specific about wanting only circles. Zoey cut some of her own tissue paper and made a picture of a girl with a hat for her first picture. For her second picture she put layer upon layer upon layer upon layer of tissue paper and colored glue. She was really enjoying mixing the colored glue.

Also Sierra had to have her hair in braids like Zoey. I can't believe I was able to braid it.

We also looked at the stoplight in the book and used this as a jumping point to talk about street signs. We read a few books from the library about signs and Zoey wanted to make her own.

It says, "Caution, Watch for Children." She put it in the hall and when I walked down the hallway she would jump out and say, "Watch for children!" What a nut she is.

We also talked about different types of clothing and weather. By the end of the week the snow was almost gone. We got our new snow boots on and headed out. Sierra went down to our neighbor's tree-covered yard where there was more snow. She was walking around in it saying, "Tracks, tracks Mommy!" I asked her if she was making tracks in the snow like Peter in the book and she gave me a  big smile and said yes. I had planned on talking about making tracks in the snow but I forgot. Thanks to Sierra we still go it all done. She walked around and around for the longest time making tracks.

Both of the girls worked on making lapbooks for this story.  A lapbook is a file folder folded to open like a shutter in the front with different things glued inside. For Sierra this was her first lapbook. She was SO happy to use glue stick and "do school" like Zoey. She is so proud of it. She showed it to my mom and dad with big smiles on her face.

Last but not least we learned a new snow song this week. I used to sing this one all the time when I taught. It is sung to I'm a little teapot....

I'm a little snowman, short and fat
Here are my buttons, here is my hat
When the sun comes out I can't play
I just simply melt away.

By the way there is still snow piled up in places here or there. Crazy.

Who Owns the Sun?

The last week of school in December before I flew away to Florida we studied the book Who Owns the Sun by Stacy Chbosky. I was not sure if Zoey would be ready for the topic of this book or not. It is about slavery. This book was written by a 14-year-old girl, Stacy Chbosky. It is a simple book but very well written. I decided to go ahead with this story for the book of the week since the history lesson in it is very valuable and one that will continue to be built on throughout Zoey's schooling.

The week started off with the obvious discussion of slavery. I kept it as simple as I could and answered any questions Zoey had. She didn't have too many but she agreed that it was wrong. I found so many picture books at the library to go along with this theme that we are still reading some of them now, almost a month later. We also discussed family relationships, how we show people we care about them. Then we placed our story disk in south eastern US.

We learned new vocabulary words on the second day and learned about the question mark. Zoey now uses it from time to time when writing the words for the people in her drawings. Our last discussion for this day was poetic prose. I think it went over her head, it kind of did mine. lol

The next day was art. We looked at the pictures in the book and noted how the illustrator used watercolors. She used bright light and shadows to help with the emotion of the story. This led to a discussion of shadows and using them in our artwork. Now Zoey is noticing shadows everywhere! We painted with watercolors. Sierra joined in on the fun with this and both girls painted many, many pictures. Sierra always surprises me. She is very particular about her artwork. She doesn't just pile stuff on until the page is full. I have examples of this for my review of The Snow Day, which will be next.

For applied math we counted the stars on one page and the pickets in a fence on another. Zoey can count very well from 1 to 12 and 16 to 40 but 13, 14, and 15 are not always all there. Sierra can count to 12 and I haven't even been trying to teach her numbers.

The last day was science and we never got to this because I got busy packing. I am sure we will pick it up again at another time.

Now this has nothing to do with our school work but when we were at the library the girls got to decorate a gingerbread house together. Isn't it cute?